User:Maddi Haraway/Sahachiro Hata

Paul Ehrlich and Sahachiro Hata search for the 'magic bullet' for syphilis.

Early Life

Sahachiro Hata was born on March 23, 1873 in Shimane Prefecture in Tsumo Village (currently Masuda City) as the eighth son of a Yamane family. At the age of 14, he was adopted by the Hata family, who had been a family of doctors for generations. Hata completed his medical education in Okayama at the Third Higher School of Medicine (now Okayama University School of Medicine).

In August of 1895, Hata graduated from medical school and married Chiyo, the eldest daughter of Tokuta Hata, at the age of 22. In the same year, he joined the Tokyo Konoe Regiment as a one-year volunteer. In 1897, he became an assistant at Okayama Prefectural Hospital where records show that he learned internal medicine from Zenjiro Inoue and medical chemistry from Torasaburo Araki.

Plague Research

Statue of Sahachiro Hata at the Hata Memorial Museum in Masuda City.

In August of 1898, Sahachiro Hata entered the Institute of Medical Science in Tokyo. He studied under the Japanese bacteriologist Kitasato Shibasaburō, who co-discovered the infectious agent of bubonic plague, Yersinia pestis. The institute became public in 1899, and Hata worked as an assistant for eight years conducting extensive plague research. He was mostly involved in the prevention of the bubonic plague, since plague had swept through Japan in 1899 during the third plague pandemic. Hata wrote more than a dozen treatises on the bubonic plague and formulated the "Plague Prevention Law" with Goro Shibayama. In 1904, Hata traveled to the southern part of China as a military doctor in the Russo-Japanese War.

Finding the 'Magic Bullet' for Syphilis

In 1909, Sahachiro Hata went to work in Paul Ehrlich's laboratory in Frankfurt, Germany to help Ehrlich in his quest to develop a treatment for syphilis. The causative agent of syphilis was discovered to be the spirochete, Treponema pallidum, by Fritz Schaudinn and Erich Hoffmann in 1905. Syphilis was initially treated by topical-application or ingestion of mercury, which was very toxic. However, arsenical compounds had proven to be effective against trypanosomes, which are similar to spirochetes, so Ehrlich directed Hata to screen all of the known synthetic arsenic derivatives for antisyphilitic properties. When Hata injected compound No. 606, arsphenamine, into rabbits infected with syphilis, he found it to be effective against syphilis in vivo. Arsphenamine was first thought to be useless when it was tested by Ehrlich's former assistants, so he blamed their inadequate methods for the delay of this important discovery. At the Congress for Internal Medicine at Wiesbaden in April 1910, Ehrlich and Hata shared their successful clinical results, which showed arsphenamine as an effective treatment for syphilis. The drug was marketed under the name Salvarsan and gained international acclaim as the first man-made antibiotic. Before Salvarsan, drugs were not made to target specific diseases, like in the case of mercury treatments. Thus, Hata's and Ehrlich's work was a turning point for experimental and therapeutic pharmacology and paved the way for the development of antibiotics decades later. Salvarsan was established as the standard treatment for syphilis until it was replaced by the antibiotic penicillin after WWII, which has fewer adverse side effects.